


box my thoughts and give me some relief

by shslduelist (joeri)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Hospitalization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 05:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18462854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joeri/pseuds/shslduelist
Summary: and i’m always lost and never found.





	box my thoughts and give me some relief

Jin Kusanagi floats down into a place that no one can peer into, beyond the canvas of his colorless irises—no longer mirror-like, glassy and soulful.

They wonder how it happens, how a child can fight for his survival up until the moment that he’s saved and then shut down to the point of no return, or seemingly. As if the saving had broken him and not the months of endless abuse. Countless doctors tell the fourteen year old Shoichi that Jin could very well not even hear him, not understand him, permanently stunted at age six, a prisoner in his own body.

Not like Shoichi listens. Not when he can see the steadily aging face of his little brother, continuing to live, continuing to eat his rice, continuing to insist on an open window so he can feel the wind on his face in his small, heat box of a room. Shoichi tells the nurses that Jin likes the window open because they don’t keep the ‘fucking’ place more well-ventilated and they obey, but always with a reluctance, a hesitation as if Shoichi is a liar, and that hurts more.

Whether or not Jin can hear them, whether or not he has an opinion worth listening to, don’t think that his brother is a liar. He wouldn’t lie. His brother isn’t a liar.

Shoichi tells him about his day at school, sneaks in snacks that Jin isn’t allowed to have. He wishes he could hold it in his hand better, hates the way that his fingers can’t form the greatest fist, but is silently glad for the way that Shoichi clasps his hand around Jin’s to steady it, to pull the twisty popsicle to his mouth and let it turn his mouth purple and yellow.

Jin used to love the colors purple and yellow.

The doctors don’t believe that he remembers. He knows his numbers and his colors, Shoichi taught them to him. He knows about sunflowers and roses, tulips and chrysanthemums. When Shoichi brings him flowers, he teaches him what they all are. He knows how to mouth their names. He knows how to make the most gentle noises, and some of the most unsettling, his throat straining to recreate what he knows, what he _knows_ he knows.

It isn’t the worst, knowing that some people don’t have faith in the boy at the bottom of the ocean, struggling to swim through the static and to the surface again. He’s seen Shoichi exasperated. He’s seen Shoichi take his hand, lose heart, mutter something into his knuckles about, “I wish you could hear me,” before locking eyes, looking at him— _really_ looking at him and amending it to, “I wish you could answer me.”

And Shoichi doesn’t mean to hurt. He could never. It’s the last thing he could ever dream of doing, but Jin can’t help the way his heart pounds uglier in his chest, despising himself for the way he can’t move his mouth.

“Nii… -san,” he manages to slur out once, to Shoichi’s shock and amazement, and Shoichi’s eyes well up, his nose turning a bright shade of red, like he’s only seen him do when they were kids. Jin thinks that maybe he’s the only one other than their parents that’s really seen Shoichi cry.

He embraces him and it’s in his arms that Jin feels like nothing evil could ever happen to him ever again. From the bottom of the static that leaks in and out of his head, making his nose bloody at intervals and forcing him to eject his dinner sometimes, Jin has an arm outstretched and sometimes it gets a handshake back from the void: a promise that one day he’ll surface again, like the child in him is reconciling with the teenager he’s become, that soon he’ll be repaired enough to let him free again.

_I can’t lose you,_ it says, chaining him down where he cannot speak. _I’m saving you,_ the trauma tells him, and he knows, he knows it’s the way of the river in his skull but he wishes there was a quicker way out.

One day, a man glowing in radiance comes to take him away, and Jin can’t help but think, _not like this._

_If you take me, let me speak, let me hold a pair of chopsticks again, let me smile._

_If you take me, let me rise from the puddle._

And suddenly a field of fake flowers crunch beneath his toes, wet with static.

It fills his head with the sound, the forbidden anthem, the endless echo, the false reality.

What distresses Jin most is that he can’t say it: they’re heather. He’s standing in a field of heather.

_Shoichi, can you hear me? I remembered the name. I heard you._

_I can always hear you._


End file.
